Collaborate Disseminate
In early 2018, cybersecurity researchers discovered two security flaws they said were present in almost every high-end processor made and used by major companies. UPEC product development team (l to r): Mo Fadiheh, Wolfgang Kunz, Dominik Stoffel. Known… Continue reading Algorithms can now find bugs in computer chips before they are made
Not every computer is a performance gaming rig. Some of us need cheap laptops and tablets for simple Internet browsing or word processing, and we don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars just for that. With a cheaper price tag comes cheaper hardware, though, such as the eMMC standard which allows flash memory to be used in a more cost-advantageous way than SSDs. For a look at some the finer points of eMMC chips, we’ll turn to [Jason]’s latest project.
[Jason] had a few damaged eMMC storage chips and wanted to try to repair them. The most common failure …read more
A vulnerability in the firmware of a Wi-Fi chipset that is widely used in laptops, streaming, gaming and a variety of “smart” devices can be exploited to compromise them without user interaction. The research and the discovered flaws The di… Continue reading Bug in widespread Wi-Fi chipset firmware can lead to zero-click code execution
Building an LED matrix is a fun project, but it can be a bit of a pain. Usually it starts with hand-soldering individual LEDs and resistors together, then hooking them up to rows and columns so they can be driven by a microcontroller of some sort. That’s a lot of tedious work, but you can order an LED matrix pre-built to save some time and headache. You’ll still need a driver though, and while building one yourself can be rewarding there are many pitfalls and trade-offs to consider when undertaking that project as well. Or, you can consider one of …read more
“Gummy” might not be an adjective that springs to mind when describing metals, but anyone who has had the flutes of a drill bit or end mill jammed with aluminum will tell you that certain metals do indeed behave in unhelpful ways. But a new research paper seeks to shed light on the gummy metal phenomenon, and may just have machinists stocking up on office supplies.
It’s a bit counterintuitive that harder metals like steel are often easier to cut than softer metals; especially aluminum but also copper, nickel alloys, and some stainless steel alloys. But it happens, and [Srinivasan …read more
Continue reading Sharpies and Glue Sticks Fight the Gummy Metal Machining Blues
Sixty years ago this month, an unassuming but gifted engineer sitting in a lonely lab at Texas Instruments penned a few lines in his notebook about his ideas for building complete circuits on a single slab of semiconductor. He had no way of knowing if his idea would even work; the idea that it would become one of the key technologies of the 20th century that would rapidly change everything about the world would have seemed like a fantasy to him.
We’ve covered the story of how the integrated circuit came to be, and the ensuing patent battle that would …read more
Continue reading Profiles in Science: Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit
Ages ago, making a custom circuit board was hard. Either you had to go buy some traces at Radio Shack, or you spent a boatload of money talking to a board house. Now, PCBs are so cheap, I’m considering tiling my bathroom with them. Today, making a custom chip is horrifically expensive. You can theoretically make a transistor at home, but anything more demands quartz tube heaters and hydrofluoric acid. Custom ASICs are just out of reach for the home hacker, unless you’re siphoning money off of some crypto Ponzi scheme.
Now things may be changing. Costs are coming down, …read more
The crooks don’t steal your whole card, which you’d probably notice, but just the chip from it… Continue reading Crooks are swapping out chips on payment cards, says US Secret Service
There have been so many launches of very capable little single-board computers, that it is easy to forget an individual one among the crowd. You probably remember the C.H.I.P though, for its audacious claim back in 2015 to be the first $9 computer. It ran Linux, and included wireless connectivity, composite video output, and support for battery power. As is so often the case with ambitious startups, progress from the C.H.I.P’s creator Next Thing Co came in fits and starts.
In recent months there has been something of a silence, and now members of the community have discovered evidence that …read more
This blog reviews the details of Meltdown and discusses the inherent immunity for end users provided by Bromium’s architecture. Meltdown is an Intel CPU vulnerability leveraging speculative execution which gives an attacker-controlled process the… Continue reading Anatomy of Meltdown – A Technical Journey